Pearl Harbor moves from memory to history

More than a half-century ago, in the dark November days after the Kennedy assassination, White House officials set the date for members of Lyndon B. Johnson’s family to move from their home in Washington’s Spring Valley into the executive mansion: Dec. 7, 1963. Lady Bird Johnson was aghast.

“I wished it could have been the 6th or the 8th or the 9th,” she told me almost 16 years ago. She thought that moving into the White House on Dec. 7 was, as she put it in that long-ago conversation, “a day of ill omen.”

Hardly anyone alive this week — in the days before the 75th anniversa...